It is sometimes desirable to ascertain the attitude of an author of document towards entities or events described therein. For example, in the customer relations context it is important to ascertain whether the author of an electronic mail message has a positive or negative attitude towards a company's products and services. Some methods of attitude evaluation involve merely summing the number of terms in a document having positive versus negative connotations to derive a score for the document as a whole. For example, positive words can be assigned a positive value while negative words are assigned a negative value. In this approach, the sum of the values would represent the (positive or negative) attitude of the author. This approach is too simplistic, however, since it does not discriminate between entities or events discussed in the document, some of which the author may view in a positive light and others the author may view negatively. Another limitation of this approach is that it fails to take into account the influence that context can have on nominally positive or negative terms.